Day 10 was a secondary day to our delta works visit on day 9 and a visit to the dakahker rooftop farm in the city of Rotterdam.
The rooftop farm utilized many tactics to make it an extremely sustainable building and a blueprint for future similar projects. To make the farm work in the first place they had to use multiple layers of padding to make sure roots don’t grow through the ceiling. The farm itself was placed on the roof of a unutilized office building as a way to not waste the space and they want to expand the idea of rooftop gardens across Rotterdam and further to improve urban living. One of the big selling point of a rooftop farm in a place like Rotterdam is because of the sponge effect. With all the problems Rotterdam has with flooding during rainstorms a bunch of rooftop farms could collect that water and distribute it over if it’s not used to the plants rather than just flowing straight into the streets and their basins they made for temporary storage of water. During our tour of the farm and the surrounding area we actually saw the basins working in real time because it was raining pretty hard, and In about 15 minutes of light rain some of the basins were already filling up. On top of being a pretty decent solution to their water problem the farm also supports one thousand bees which are essential in today’s world and could be extremely beneficial if used in American cities.
For the second part of the day we visited the delta works museum. The museum was actually started by a survivor of the famous 1953 flood and was built inside of one of the parts that stopped the flood that year. She gave some insight on what it was like to experience the flood and some warnings on how to think when you have a disaster coming your way. She also went very in depth about the concrete structures that the Netherlands purchased from Great Britain during the floods to place in a spot where the dikes broke as a way to fill the hole and prevent further damage.
